


The Earth From Which You Have Been Hiding

by PrufrockianParalysis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bittersweet, Drabble, F/M, poor babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:09:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrufrockianParalysis/pseuds/PrufrockianParalysis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose spends the summer with Dave, some things are beautiful and everything hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Earth From Which You Have Been Hiding

**Author's Note:**

> Title and all poetry chunks from Jack Spicer's beautiful "Psychoanlysis: An Elegy"

_I’m thinking that she is very much like California._

_When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways_

_Traveling up and down her skin_

_Long empty highways_

_With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them_

_On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California_

_And I a rich Eastern tourist_

_Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas_

_Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California_

_That I have never seen._

 

            You would have been quicker on the uptake, were you not so transfixed by the thin sheen of sweat pooled in the hard dent of her collarbone. The shadows she keeps there, trapped between her thin bones and her skin, often distract you – they twist with each of her movements - they shimmer, simmer. She is all light, all hard angles – and you want, every morning, to take your camera to the thick, almost tangible shadows below her cheekbones, right beneath her ears. 

            When you don’t answer her question, she kicks you beneath the table. You can feel the bruise begin almost immediately. You compose an image of it in your mind, it will start pale – the same color as the inside of her wrist, and then deepen, deepen, until it matches the dark circles below her eyes. Had she hit you straight on, it might even have become the same purple as her lips, last night, when the two of you ran from the community pool, hopped the fence, tripped through the tall grass until you fell, laughing, in a tangle of limbs and want and cold and desperation.

            “I _said_ ,” she says, “In the context of the time, he really was a hero, don’t you agree?”

            “Uh..Hitler? Are we talking about Hitler?” You try to sound nonchalant, but seriously, you have no fucking idea what she’s been saying to you. You were always under the impression that you two had a solid tune-out policy - an infomercial kind of arrangement. It doesn’t matter if you get up to take a piss halfway through, as long as you pick up on the toll-free number at the end.

            “ _No._ ” Her mouth curls slightly at the corner and then smoothes again. You cannot tell if this is irritation or bemusement. She hides well behind the poker face you could never quite pull all the way down.

            She takes her time, swirls the last of her coffee in the bottom of her mug and tips it back. If you listen hard, you can hear the sugar granules click between her teeth. She takes her coffee light and sweet when she’s with you, but black when you’re with anyone else. You notice this, but don’t mention it – those are the things that close her off, draw her jaw tight, leave you alone in the apartment with the ghost of her, the tremble of the violin through her door, the wet inhale of the refrigerator as she opens and closes and opens and closes it in the middle of the night, when she thinks you’re asleep. Her emotions are like the weather - you see the clouds pass behind her eyes, sometimes, and the lightning flick through her veins.

            But now it is summer, a particularly hot summer, and she wears shorts over tights everywhere you go – you like the demure slope of her legs, the way she always lopes in front of you as you walk through fields, across highways, beneath the overpass where you two share cigarettes kissed dark from her lipstick. It’s been a lazy summer, even through the diner window, you can see the thickness of the heat in the air. It makes everything glow a sick, alien orange in the watery morning light.

            “Not Hitler.” She repeats, flipping the hair out of her eyes and looking patently bored and frustrated. _Callous, Calculating and Condescending, copyright Rose Lalonde Inc._

            “I was talking about Jack Kerouac. You previously mentioned that nothing good ever happened in Texas, and I thought I should point out that Kerouac came here.”

            “…And that he was a hero?”

            “Considering the time, yes. He made it acceptable to just,” She pauses, and looks at you – hard – for a moment. “…Leave. He reminded traditional, family-values oriented America that sometimes…you can’t let anything hinder you.”

            You feel it all before you have time to manufacture a response. You’re suddenly very aware of all your skin, of the noise your heart makes within your chest and the cloying stickiness of your hair – still veined with chlorine from the pool. _Can’t let anything hinder you, can’t let anything can’t hinder fuck –_

            You didn’t mean to kiss her, but you kissed her two weeks into the summer because you were drunk on the porch, smoking cigarette after cigarette, coating your wine-dark mouth in a raw, sweet need. The bugs were so loud and she snorted, _snorted_ , and said something about limestone, mica, sweet glittering treasures she found in the caves with Jade – she talked about going to a carnival with John, the circus, the zoo, talked about collecting pretty feathers for her hair, and eating popcorn until she felt sick, _but good sick,_ she said, _if that makes any sense at all_.

            She spent time with all of you, ever since she decided to take time away from college, away from life. You thought of the caves and carnivals, and realized you couldn’t give her any of that shit here in Texas. So you kissed her. That, you thought, would not be sufficient, but might at least be a little distracting.

            You two didn’t talk about it for two days. You drove out into the desert and shot a shitty old BB gun you found at your brother’s house at rocks and cacti. She left little constellations of holes through each of the paper-thin white cactus flowers. Then, she kissed you in your car and she tasted like dust and sunshine and something stale but not unpleasant, and you ran your hands up her back, counting her vertebra and then ribs – she was warm and real, curled around you in the passenger seat, neck crunched to avoid banging her head on the windshield. _Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands_ , you thought, idly reminded of e.e. cummings, and you almost laughed at yourself, but it was caught in the riptide of her breath and, in the end, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.

            You avoid looking at her, and finish your hot chocolate. You drink straight down to the thick chocolate mucus at the bottom, and wince a little as it glides down the back of your throat in one foul, unbroken trail. You two deal in indecision, impulse. Obscurity. She hasn’t said anything to you, not really, but you understand her silences the way you understand her shadows. Rose Lalonde is composed of light and language, but it’s always been the absences that are important. You wonder if she knows that you know that. You do not say anything, though, because you can already see yourself losing her, and you’re just not fucking strong enough to keep holding on, and absolutely not strong enough to let go.

            “Stay a couple more days.” You say, looking out the window. The sun has finally come all the way up, you can already see the haze shivering its way across the asphalt. “I’ll show you Austin. We’ll drive up there, see a show or something. It’ll be cool. Or whatever.”

            “Okay.” She says, and she smiles, but her eyes aren’t really in it.

            “Cool.” You say, and it feels enough like a promise.

            “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”   

_I am thinking of how many times this poem_

_Will be repeated._

_How many summers_

_Will torture California_

_Until the damned maps burn_

_Until the mad cartographer_

_Falls to the ground and possesses_

_The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding._

**Author's Note:**

> Written in about an hour for the lovely MistCover (grimdarkthroes.tumblr.com). Woohoo.


End file.
